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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Anger, Book One
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On Anger, Book One

1 You have pressed me, Novatus,1 to write about how anger can be soothed, and you are right, I think, to fear this passion above all others, since it is the most hideous and frenzied of them all. The others have some element of quiet and calm in them; this one is all agitation and onrush. Raging with a most inhuman lust for wounds and weapons, for blood and torture, it cares nothing for itself so long as it can harm another; it throws itself onto the very spears, greedy for a vengeance that will drag the avenger down with it.

Some wise men, therefore, have said that anger is a brief madness. Anger is no more master of itself than madness is: forgetful of decency, unmindful of every tie, stubborn and intent on whatever it has begun, closed to reason and counsel, stirred up by empty causes, unfit to discern what is fair and true, very like a collapsing building that shatters on top of what it crushes. And so that you may know that those whom anger has seized are not sane, look at their very bearing. Madmen show sure signs: a bold and threatening look, a grim brow, a fierce face, a hurried step, restless hands, a changed color, sighs that come thick and are drawn too hard. The angry show the same signs. Their eyes blaze and flash, the whole face is flushed as the blood surges up from deep in the chest, the lips quiver, the teeth are clenched, the hair bristles and stands on end, the breath comes forced and hissing, the joints crack as they wrench themselves, there is groaning and bellowing and talk broken off in words hardly made out, the hands are struck together again and again, the ground is pounded with the feet, the whole body is in an uproar and acting out the great threats of anger. Men who twist themselves out of shape and swell up present a face foul and horrible to see; you could not tell whether this vice is more hateful or more ugly.

Other passions can be hidden and nursed in secret; anger shows itself and comes out on the face, and the greater it is, the more plainly it boils over. Do you not see how in all animals, as soon as they rise up to do harm, warning signs run ahead, and their whole bodies leave their usual quiet bearing and sharpen their fierceness? Boars foam at the mouth and whet their tusks by rubbing them; bulls toss their horns at the empty air and scatter the sand with pounding hooves; lions roar; snakes swell their necks when provoked; mad dogs have a grim look. No animal is so horrible and so deadly by nature that a fresh surge of fierceness does not appear in it once anger has invaded it. I know, of course, that the other passions too are hard to hide, that lust and fear and boldness give signs of themselves and can be detected in advance; for no violent agitation enters us without moving something in the face. What, then, is the difference? The other passions show; this one stands out.

2 Now if you care to look at what it does and the damage it causes, no plague has cost the human race more. You will see slaughter and poisoning, defendants in mourning clothes accusing one another, the ruin of cities and the destruction of whole nations, the lives of leading men put up for sale at public auction, torches set to houses, and fires not kept within city walls but whole vast regions glowing with enemy flame. Look at the foundations of the most famous cities, now barely to be traced: anger threw them down. Look at the wastes, deserted for many miles without an inhabitant: anger emptied them. Look at all the leaders handed down to memory as examples of an evil fate: anger stabbed one in his bed, struck down another amid the sacred laws of the table, tore another to pieces within the very precincts of the law and in full view of the crowded forum, made another shed his blood by his own son’s parricidal hand, another to bare his royal throat to a slave’s hand, another to have his limbs stretched on a cross. And so far I am telling only of punishments of individuals. What if you chose to leave aside those against whom anger blazed one by one, and to look at assemblies cut down with the sword, the plebs butchered by soldiers let loose on them, and whole peoples condemned to death in a common ruin ⟨…⟩2

[Fragment: Martin of Braga, On Anger 2]

Anger turns everything from the best and most just into its opposite. Whomever it takes hold of, it lets him remember no duty. Give it to a father, he is an enemy; give it to a son, he is a parricide; give it to a mother, she is a stepmother; give it to a citizen, he is a public enemy; give it to a king, he is a tyrant.

[Fragment: Lactantius, On the Anger of God 17.13]

Anger is the desire to avenge a wrong, or, as Posidonius3 says, the desire to punish the person by whom you think you have been unjustly harmed. Some have defined it like this: anger is an incitement of the mind to harm someone who has either done harm or wished to do harm.

⟨…⟩ as though against people who either neglect our care or despise our authority. And what of this? Why does the crowd get angry with gladiators, and so unjustly that it thinks it a wrong that they do not die willingly? It judges itself despised, and in face, gesture, and heat it turns from spectator into adversary. Whatever is of this kind is not anger but something like anger, like the anger of children who, if they fall, want the ground beaten, and often do not even know why they are angry, but are simply angry, without cause and without a wrong, though not without some impression of a wrong and not without some desire for punishment. So they are fooled with pretended blows and appeased by the sham tears of someone begging pardon, and a false grief is removed by a false revenge.

3 “We are often angry,” someone says, “not with those who have harmed us but with those who are going to harm us; so you can see that anger is not born of a wrong.” It is true that we are angry with those who are going to harm us, but they harm us by the very thought of it, and the man who is about to do a wrong is already doing it. “So you can see,” he says, “that anger is not a desire for punishment: the weakest are often angry with the most powerful, and they do not desire a punishment they cannot hope for.” First, we said it was a desire to exact punishment, not the power to do so; and men desire even what they cannot have. Second, no one is so lowly that he cannot hope to punish even the highest of men: we all have power enough to do harm.

Aristotle’s definition is not far from ours; he says anger is the desire to pay back pain. What the difference is between our definition and his would take long to set out. Against both it is objected that wild beasts get angry, though they are neither provoked by a wrong nor seeking anyone’s punishment or pain; for even if they bring these about, they do not aim at them. But we must say that wild beasts are without anger, and so is everything except man; for though anger is the enemy of reason, it is never born except where reason has a place. Beasts have impulses, rage, fierceness, the urge to attack; but anger they have no more than they have luxury, even though in certain pleasures they are less restrained than man. There is no reason to believe the poet who says:

“The boar forgets his rage, the deer forgets to trust her speed,
the bears forget to charge the sturdy herds.”4

When he says “rage,” he means being roused and driven forward; they no more know how to be angry than how to pardon. Dumb animals lack human passions, but they have certain impulses like them. Otherwise, if there were love and hate in them, there would also be friendship and enmity, discord and concord; some traces of these do exist in them too, but good and evil belong to human hearts alone. Prudence, foresight, diligence, reflection have been granted to no one but man, and animals are barred not only from human virtues but from human vices as well. Their whole make, inside as well as outside, is unlike man’s; that royal and ruling part in them is shaped differently. They have a voice, but one that cannot be articulated, confused and incapable of words; they have a tongue, but one that is tied and not free for varied movements; in the same way their ruling part itself is not fine, not exact. So it takes in sights and impressions of things that call it to impulses, but blurred and confused ones. Hence their rushes and tumults are violent, but fear and anxiety, sorrow and anger they do not have, only certain things like them; and so these quickly subside and turn into their opposites, and after the fiercest raging and panic they graze, and wild roaring and running about are followed at once by rest and sleep.

4 What anger is has been explained well enough. How it differs from irascibility (iracundia) is plain: as the drunk man differs from the drunkard, and the frightened man from the timid one. An angry man may not be irascible; an irascible man may sometimes not be angry. The other terms by which the Greeks divide anger into kinds under several names I shall pass over, since they have no words of their own in our language, even though we call people bitter and sharp, and no less peevish, rabid, loud, difficult, and harsh, all of which are varieties of anger; among these you may put the morose, a finicky kind of irascibility. For there are angers that settle down after some shouting; some no less persistent than frequent; some savage with the hand and sparing of words; some that pour themselves out in bitter words and abuse; some that go no further than complaining and turning away; some that are deep and heavy and turned inward. There are a thousand other kinds of this many-sided evil.

5 We have asked what anger is, whether it befalls any animal besides man, how it differs from irascibility, and how many kinds of it there are. Now let us ask whether anger is according to nature, and whether it is useful and should be kept in some part.

Whether it is according to nature will be clear if we look at man. What is gentler than man, as long as his mind is in its right condition? And what is crueler than anger? What loves others more than man? What is more hostile than anger? Man was born for mutual help, anger for destruction; he wants to come together, it wants to break apart; he wants to help, it wants to harm; he will aid even strangers, it will attack even those dearest to it; he is ready even to spend himself for the good of others, it is ready to plunge into danger so long as it drags others down. Who, then, knows less of Nature than the man who assigns this savage and deadly vice to her best and most finished work? Anger, as we said, is greedy for punishment, and for such a craving to dwell in man’s most peaceable heart is not at all according to his nature. Human life rests on benefits and concord, and it is bound into a compact of common help not by terror but by mutual love.

6 “Well then? Is correction not sometimes necessary?” Of course it is, but without anger, with reason. For it does not harm; it heals under the guise of harming. Just as we scorch certain crooked spear shafts to straighten them, and squeeze them with driven wedges, not to break them but to take out the bend, so we correct characters warped by vice with pain of body and mind. A doctor, you know, when the disorders are slight, first tries not to change the daily routine much, to set an order for food, drink, and exercise, and to strengthen the health merely by rearranging the way of life. The next step is to see whether a limit on quantity helps. If limit and order do no good, he takes some things away and cuts others back; if even then the body does not respond, he forbids food and relieves the body by fasting; if the gentler measures have failed, he opens a vein, and if limbs clinging to the body do harm and spread the disease, he puts his hand to the limbs themselves; and no treatment seems harsh whose result is health. So it is fitting for the guardian of the laws and ruler of the state to heal characters with words, and gentle ones, as long as he can, persuading people to do what they should, winning their minds over to a desire for the honorable and the fair, and creating a hatred of vice and a regard for virtue; then let him pass to sterner speech, in which he still warns and reproaches; last of all let him resort to punishments, and these still light and revocable; let him reserve the extreme penalties for the extreme crimes, so that no one dies unless dying is good even for the one who dies. In one thing only will he be unlike those who heal: they give an easy end to those whom they could not give life, while he drives the condemned out of life with disgrace and public exposure, not because he takes pleasure in anyone’s punishment (such inhuman fierceness is far from the wise man), but so that they may be a lesson to all, and so that, since they would not be useful to the state alive, the state may at least make use of their death.

So man’s nature does not crave punishment; and therefore anger is not in accordance with man’s nature either, because anger craves punishment. I will also bring in Plato’s argument, for what harm is there in using other people’s arguments where they are on our side? “The good man,” he says, “does no harm.”5 Punishment does harm; therefore punishment does not suit the good man, and for this reason neither does anger, since punishment suits anger. If the good man takes no joy in punishment, he will take no joy either in the passion that finds its pleasure in punishment; therefore anger is not natural.

7 But even though anger is not natural, should we take it up because it has often been useful? It lifts the spirit and spurs it on; without it courage does nothing magnificent in war: the flame must be kindled from this source, this goad must drive men on and send them boldly into danger. That is why some think it best to temper anger, not to remove it, and, cutting away what overflows, to bring it down to a healthy measure, but to keep that part without which action will flag and the force and vigor of the mind will go slack. First, it is easier to shut out harmful things than to govern them, and easier not to let them in than to moderate them once they are in; for once they have taken possession, they are stronger than their ruler and will not let themselves be cut back or reduced. Second, reason itself, to which the reins are handed, is powerful only so long as it is kept apart from the passions; if it has mixed with them and been stained by them, it cannot hold back those it could have kept away. For the mind, once shaken and dislodged, is the slave of whatever drives it. With some things the beginnings are in our power; what follows sweeps us along by its own force and leaves no way back. Bodies thrown over a cliff have no control over themselves; once cast down, they cannot resist or stop, for the headlong fall that cannot be recalled cuts off all second thoughts and regret, and they cannot help arriving where they were free not to go. In the same way the mind, if it has flung itself into anger, love, and the other passions, is not allowed to check its onrush; its own weight and the downhill nature of vice must carry it off and drive it to the bottom.

8 The best course is to reject the first provocation to anger at once, to fight its very seeds, and to take care not to fall into anger. For if it begins to carry us off course, the way back to safety is hard, since there is no room for reason once passion has been let in and given some rights by our own will: from then on it will do as much as it likes, not as much as you allow. The enemy, I say, must be held off at the very frontier; for once he has entered and burst through the gates, he takes no terms from his captives. The mind is not set apart, watching the passions from outside so as to keep them from going further than they should; it is itself changed into the passion, and so it cannot call back that useful and saving strength once it has been betrayed and weakened. As I said, these two do not have separate and distinct seats; passion and reason are only the mind changing for the better or for the worse. How, then, will reason rise again once vices have seized and crushed it, once it has given way to anger? Or how will it free itself from a confusion in which the admixture of the worse has prevailed? “But some people,” someone says, “control themselves in anger.” Do they, then, do nothing of what anger dictates, or something? If they do nothing, it is clear that anger is not needed for action, though you called it in as if it had something stronger than reason. Finally, I ask: is it stronger than reason or weaker? If stronger, how will reason be able to impose a limit on it, when only weaker things usually obey? If it is weaker, reason is enough by itself to get things done without it and has no need of help from something weaker. “But some angry men keep steady and control themselves.” When? When the anger is already fading and leaving of its own accord, not when it is at the boil; then it is the stronger. “Well then? Do they not sometimes, even in anger, let those they hate go unharmed and untouched, and refrain from harming them?” They do. When? When one passion has beaten back another, and either fear or greed has won its point. Then the mind has grown quiet not by the kindness of reason but by a faithless and evil truce among the passions.

9 Then again, anger has nothing useful in it and does not sharpen the mind for war; for virtue is sufficient to itself and never needs the help of vice. Whenever it needs to charge, it does not get angry; it rises up, and it is roused or relaxed as far as it judges necessary, just as missiles shot from catapults are in the control of the man who shoots them, as to how far they are hurled. “Anger,” says Aristotle, “is necessary, and nothing can be taken by storm without it, unless it fills the mind and kindles the spirit; but it must be used not as a commander but as a soldier.” This is false. For if it listens to reason and follows where it is led, it is no longer anger, whose very mark is defiance; but if it resists and does not grow quiet when ordered, but is carried on by its own will and fierceness, it is as useless a servant of the mind as a soldier who ignores the signal to retreat. So if it lets a limit be set on it, it must be called by another name; it has stopped being anger, which I understand to be unbridled and untamed. If it does not, it is deadly and not to be counted among our aids. So either it is not anger or it is useless. For if someone exacts punishment not out of greed for punishment itself but because it is right, he is not to be counted among the angry. The useful soldier will be the one who knows how to obey orders; the passions make as bad servants as they make leaders.

10 Reason, therefore, will never take into its service reckless and violent impulses over which it would have no authority, and which it could never hold down except by setting against them others equal and like them, fear against anger, anger against sloth, greed against fear. Far from virtue be this evil, that reason should ever take refuge in vices! A mind like that cannot find a trustworthy rest; it must be shaken and tossed about if it relies on its own evils for its safety, if it cannot be brave unless it is angry, hardworking unless it craves, quiet unless it fears: it must live under a tyranny, once it has passed into slavery to some passion. Are we not ashamed to lower the virtues into clientship to the vices? Then again, reason ceases to have any power if it can do nothing without passion, and it begins to be equal and like it. For what is the difference, if passion without reason is as rash a thing as reason without passion is ineffective? The two are equal when one cannot exist without the other. But who could bear to make passion the equal of reason? “So passion is useful,” someone says, “if it is moderate.” No: if it is useful by nature. But if it will not submit to command and to reason, all it will gain by moderation is that the less of it there is, the less harm it will do; so a moderate passion is nothing but a moderate evil.

11 “But against enemies,” someone says, “anger is necessary.” Nowhere less: there the onrush must not be let loose but kept in check and obedient. What else is it that breaks the barbarians, so much sturdier of body, so much more enduring of hardship, but anger, which is its own worst enemy? Gladiators too are protected by skill and laid bare by anger. Then, what need is there for anger, when reason achieves the same thing? Do you think the hunter is angry with the beasts? Yet he meets them as they come and pursues them as they flee, and reason does all this without anger. What wiped out so many thousands of Cimbri and Teutones pouring over the Alps,6 so completely that the news of so great a disaster reached their people not by a messenger but by rumor, except that they had anger in place of courage? Anger has sometimes driven forward and flattened whatever stood in its way, but more often it destroys itself. What is more spirited than the Germans? What fiercer in a charge? What more eager for arms, among which they are born and bred, their one concern while they neglect everything else? What more hardened to every kind of endurance, since for the most part they have provided themselves with no clothing for their bodies, no shelter against the endless harshness of their climate? Yet Spaniards and Gauls and the men of Asia and Syria, who are soft in war, cut them down before a legion is even in sight, and nothing makes them such easy prey as their irascibility. Come, then: give those bodies, those minds that know nothing of luxuries, extravagance, and wealth, give them reason, give them discipline. To say no more, we shall certainly have to go back to the old Roman ways. By what else did Fabius7 restore the shattered strength of the empire, except that he knew how to delay, to drag things out, to wait, all of which angry men do not know how to do? The empire, which then stood on the brink, would have perished if Fabius had dared as much as anger urged. He took the fortune of the state into his counsel, and having weighed its strength, of which nothing more could now be lost without losing everything, he set aside resentment and revenge, intent only on advantage and opportunity; he conquered anger before he conquered Hannibal. What of Scipio? Did he not leave Hannibal and the Carthaginian army and everything he had cause to be angry with, and carry the war into Africa, so slow about it that he gave the spiteful grounds to call him self-indulgent and lazy? What of the other Scipio?8 Did he not sit a long, long time before Numantia, and bear calmly this grief, his own and the state’s, that Numantia took longer to conquer than Carthage? By walling in and enclosing the enemy he drove them to fall by their own swords. So anger is not useful even in battles or wars; it is prone to rashness, and while it wants to bring danger on others, it does not guard against danger itself. The surest courage is the kind that has looked around long and carefully, has kept itself in hand, and has moved forward slowly and by design.

12 “Well then?” someone says. “Will the good man not be angry if he sees his father murdered, his mother carried off?” He will not be angry; he will avenge them, he will protect them. Why are you afraid that devotion, even without anger, will be too weak a spur for him? Or say in the same way: “Well then? When the good man sees his father or his son under the surgeon’s knife, will he not weep and faint?” That is what we see happen to women whenever the slightest hint of danger strikes them. The good man will carry out his duties undisturbed and unafraid; and he will do what is worthy of a good man in such a way as to do nothing unworthy of a man. My father is being murdered: I will defend him. He has been murdered: I will avenge him, because it is right, not because it hurts. “Good men are angry at wrongs done to their own.” When you say this, Theophrastus,9 you are trying to make braver precepts unpopular, and you turn from the judge to the crowd of bystanders. Because everyone gets angry when such a thing happens to his own people, you think men will judge that what they do ought to be done; for as a rule everyone judges a passion just if he recognizes it in himself. But they do the same if the hot water is not served properly, if a glass gets broken, if a shoe is splashed with mud. It is not devotion that stirs that anger but weakness, as with children, who will cry as much over losing their parents as over losing their nuts. To be angry on behalf of one’s own is the mark not of a devoted mind but of a weak one. What is fine and worthy is to come forward as defender of parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens, led by duty itself, willing, judging, foreseeing, not driven and raving. For no passion is more eager for revenge than anger, and for that very reason it is unfit to take it: headlong and senseless, like almost every desire, it gets in its own way toward the very thing it hurries to. And so it has never been good either in peace or in war; it makes peace like war, and in arms it forgets that Mars favors neither side, and it falls into another’s power while it is not in its own.

Then again, vices are not to be taken into use because they have sometimes achieved something. Fevers too relieve certain kinds of illness, yet it is still better to be wholly free of them: it is a loathsome kind of remedy to owe one’s health to disease. In the same way, even if anger has sometimes helped unexpectedly, as poison, a fall, or a shipwreck has, it should not on that account be judged healthy; for deadly things have often saved lives.

13 Then again, with things worth having, the greater they are, the better and more desirable. If justice is a good, no one will say it will be better if something is taken away from it; if courage is a good, no one will want any part of it reduced. So anger too would be the better the greater it is; for who would refuse an increase of any good? But it is useless for anger to grow; therefore it is useless for it to exist. Nothing is a good that becomes an evil by increase.

“Anger is useful,” someone says, “because it makes men readier to fight.” So does drunkenness: it makes men brash and bold, and many have been better with the sword for being less than sober. By that reasoning you may as well say that delirium and madness are necessary for strength, because frenzy often makes men stronger. Well? Has not fear sometimes worked the other way and made a man bold, and has not the fear of death roused even the most sluggish to battle? But anger, drunkenness, fear, and the like are foul and fleeting stimulants; they do not equip virtue, which needs nothing from vices, but they lift a little a mind that is otherwise slow and cowardly. No one becomes braver by getting angry except the man who would not have been brave without anger; so anger comes not to help virtue but to take its place. And what of this: if anger were a good, would it not attend the most perfect men? Yet the most irascible are infants, old men, and the sick, and everything weak is by nature querulous.

14 “It cannot be,” says Theophrastus, “that the good man is not angry with the wicked.” By that reasoning, the better a man is, the more irascible he will be. See whether it is not the opposite: that he will be calmer, freer of passions, and a man who hates no one. What reason has he to hate those who do wrong, when it is error that drives them into such offenses? It is not for a prudent man to hate those who err; otherwise he will hate himself. Let him think how many things he does against good conduct, how many of his own acts need pardon: he will soon be angry with himself as well. A fair judge does not pass one sentence on his own case and another on someone else’s. No one, I say, will be found who can acquit himself, and everyone who calls himself innocent is looking to the witness, not to his conscience. How much more humane to show a mild and fatherly spirit to those who do wrong, and not to hunt them down but to call them back! A man who has lost his way and is wandering through the fields is better led to the right road than driven off.

15 So the man who does wrong must be corrected, by warning and by force, gently and harshly, and made better for himself as well as for others, not without correction, but without anger; for who is angry with the patient he is healing? “But they cannot be corrected, and there is nothing in them that is mild or capable of good hope.” Then let them be removed from the society of mortals, since they will make worse whatever they touch, and let them stop being wicked in the only way they can; but let this be done without hatred. For what reason is there for me to hate a man whom I help most at the very moment I rescue him from himself? Does anyone hate his own limbs when he cuts them off? That is not anger but a pitiful cure. We put down mad dogs; we kill a fierce and untamable ox; we take the knife to sick sheep so that they do not infect the flock; we destroy monstrous births; we even drown children if they are born weak and deformed; and it is not anger but reason to separate the useless from the sound. Nothing suits a man who punishes less than anger, since punishment does more good for reform when it is imposed with judgment. That is why Socrates said to a slave, “I would beat you if I were not angry.” He put off rebuking the slave to a saner moment; at that moment he rebuked himself. Whose passion, then, will ever be under control, when Socrates did not dare trust himself to anger?

16 So there is no need for an angry punisher to restrain those who err and those who commit crimes; for since anger is an offense of the mind, it is not right for one who does wrong to correct wrongs. “Well then? Shall I not be angry with a robber? Well then? Shall I not be angry with a poisoner?” No; I am not angry with myself when I have my blood let. I apply every kind of punishment as a remedy. “You are still in the first stage of error, and your slips are not serious but frequent: a rebuke, first in private, then in public, will try to correct you. You have already gone too far to be cured by words: disgrace will hold you in check. You need something stronger, something branded on you that you will feel: you will be sent into exile, to unknown places. Your wickedness, hardened by now, calls for harsher remedies: public chains and prison will be applied. Your mind is incurable, weaving crime upon crime; you are no longer driven by causes, which will never be lacking to a wicked man, but sinning is reason enough for you to sin. You have drunk wickedness down and worked it so deep into your vitals that it cannot leave except with them. Wretched man, you have long been looking for a way to die: we shall do you a service. We shall take from you this madness with which you torment others and are tormented, and when you have rolled through punishments, your own and others’, we shall pay you at once the one good left to you: death.” Why should I be angry with a man when I am helping him most? Sometimes the best kind of pity is to kill. If I had entered an army hospital or a rich man’s house, I would not have given the same orders to everyone, when they were sick with different illnesses. I see a variety of vices in so many minds, and I have been called in to heal the state: let the remedy be sought for each man’s disease. Let shame cure this one, travel that one, pain this one, poverty that one, the sword this one. And so, if I must put on my magistrate’s robe reversed and summon the assembly with the trumpet,10 I shall go up to the tribunal not raging or hostile but with the face of the law; I shall pronounce those solemn words in a voice gentle and grave rather than furious, and I shall order the law to take its course, not angry but severe. And when I command a guilty man’s head to be cut off, and when I sew parricides into the sack, and when I send a man to military execution, and when I set a traitor or public enemy on the Tarpeian Rock, I shall be without anger, with the same face and the same mind with which I strike at snakes and venomous creatures. “Irascibility is needed to punish.” What? Do you think the law is angry with people it does not know, has not seen, and hopes will never exist? We must take on the mind of the law, which does not get angry but decrees. For if it is fitting for a good man to be angry at evil deeds, it will also be fitting for him to envy the prosperity of evil men. For what is more outrageous than that some men flourish and abuse the indulgence of fortune, men for whom no fortune bad enough could be found? But he will look on their advantages without envy, just as he looks on their crimes without anger; a good judge condemns what deserves blame, but he does not hate. “Well then? When the wise man has something of this kind on his hands, will his mind not be touched, and will he not be more stirred than usual?” I admit it: he will feel a slight and faint movement; for, as Zeno11 says, even in the wise man’s mind, after the wound has healed, a scar remains. So he will feel certain hints and shadows of the passions, but he will be free of the passions themselves.

17 Aristotle says that certain passions, if one uses them well, serve as weapons. That would be true if, like the tools of war, they could be taken up and laid down as the man who arms himself pleases. These weapons that Aristotle gives to virtue fight on their own; they do not wait for a hand; they possess, they are not possessed. We need no other instruments; Nature has equipped us well enough with reason. She gave us this weapon, firm, lasting, obedient, not two-edged, not one that could be turned back on its owner. Reason by itself is enough not only for planning but for action. What could be more foolish than for reason to seek protection from irascibility, the stable from the unstable, the faithful from the faithless, the sound from the sick? And what of this: even for action, the one field where the help of irascibility seems necessary, reason is far stronger on its own? Once it has judged that something must be done, it persists in it; it will find nothing better than itself to change into, and so it stands by what it has once decided. Anger has often been driven back by pity; for it has no solid strength but only an empty swelling, and its beginnings are violent, just like the winds that rise from the land and, born of rivers and marshes, are violent but do not last. It starts with a great rush, then fails before its time, worn out, and though it had been turning over nothing but cruelty and new kinds of punishment, when the time comes to punish it is already broken and mild. Passion falls quickly; reason is even. Besides, even where anger has persisted, if there are several who deserve to die, it sometimes stops killing after the blood of two or three. Its first blows are sharp: so snakes’ venom does harm when they first creep out of their holes, but their fangs are harmless once frequent biting has drained them. So those who committed equal crimes do not suffer equally, and often the one who did less suffers more, because he was thrown to a fresher anger. And it is uneven in everything: now it runs further than it should, now it stops short of what is due. For it indulges itself, judges by whim, refuses to listen, leaves no room for a defense, holds onto what it has seized, and will not let its judgment be taken from it, even if that judgment is wrong.

18 Reason gives each side time, then asks for an adjournment for itself as well, to have room to sift out the truth: anger is in a hurry. Reason wants to judge what is fair: anger wants what it has judged to seem fair. Reason looks at nothing but the matter in question: anger is stirred by empty things hovering outside the case. A face too much at ease, a voice too clear, speech too free, dress too elegant, too ambitious a show of supporters, popularity with the crowd: all these exasperate it. Often from hatred of the advocate it condemns the defendant; even if the truth is thrust before its eyes, it loves and defends its error; it does not want to be proved wrong, and once it has begun badly it thinks persisting more honorable than repenting.

Gnaeus Piso,12 within our memory, was a man free of many vices, but perverse, and one who took rigidity for constancy. In anger he had ordered a soldier led off to execution for returning from leave without the comrade he had gone with, as though he had killed the man he could not produce; and when the soldier asked for a little time to search for him, Piso refused. The condemned man was led outside the rampart and was already stretching out his neck when suddenly the comrade who was thought to have been killed appeared. Then the centurion in charge of the execution ordered the guardsman to sheathe his sword and led the condemned man back to Piso, meaning to give Piso back his innocence; for fortune had given the soldier back his. The two comrades were brought in with a huge crowd around them, embracing each other, and the whole camp rejoicing. Piso mounted the tribunal in a rage and ordered both of them executed, both the soldier who had not killed and the one who had not died. What could be more outrageous? Because one had been shown innocent, two were to die. Piso added a third as well: he ordered the centurion himself, who had brought the condemned man back, to be executed. Three men were set in that same place to die because of one man’s innocence. Oh, how clever irascibility is at inventing reasons for its frenzy! “You,” he said, “I order executed because you have been condemned; you, because you were the cause of your comrade’s condemnation; you, because when ordered to kill you did not obey your general.” He devised a way to make three crimes because he had found none.

19 Irascibility, I say, has this evil in it: it refuses to be governed. It is angry with the truth itself if the truth has come to light against its wishes; with shouting and uproar and the tossing of the whole body, it pursues those it has marked out, heaping on insults and curses. Reason does not do this. But if there is need, silent and quiet, it wipes out whole houses root and branch and destroys families dangerous to the state along with their wives and children; it tears down their very houses and levels them to the ground and roots out names hostile to freedom. All this it does without gnashing its teeth or shaking its head or doing anything unbecoming a judge, whose face should be at its calmest and most composed when he is pronouncing a heavy sentence. “What need is there,” says Hieronymus,13 “when you want to strike someone, to bite your own lips first?” What if he had seen a proconsul leap down from the tribunal, snatch the fasces14 from the lictor, and tear his own clothes because other men’s clothes were not being torn off fast enough? What need is there to overturn the table? To smash the cups? To dash oneself against pillars? To tear out one’s hair, beat one’s thigh and breast? How great do you think an anger is that turns back on itself because it cannot burst out on another as fast as it wants? So such men are held back by those nearest them and begged to make their peace with themselves.

The man who, free of anger, imposes on each the punishment he deserves does none of this. He often lets go a man whose offense he has caught: if remorse for the deed holds out good hope, if he sees that the wickedness does not come from deep within but, as they say, clings to the surface of the mind, he will grant an impunity that will harm neither those who receive it nor those who give it. Sometimes he will check great crimes more lightly than lesser ones, if the great were committed by a slip, not out of cruelty, while the lesser have a hidden, covert, and long-practiced cunning in them; the same offense committed by two men he will not visit with the same penalty, if one committed it through carelessness and the other took pains to do harm. In every punishment he will always keep this in mind: one kind is applied to reform the wicked, the other to remove them. In both cases he will look not to the past but to the future (for, as Plato says, no prudent man punishes because a wrong has been done, but so that none will be done;15 the past cannot be called back, the future can be prevented), and those whom he wants to make examples of wickedness that ends badly he will execute in public, not only so that they themselves die, but so that by dying they deter others. You see how a man who must weigh and judge all this ought to come free of every disturbance to a matter that calls for the greatest care, the power of life and death. The sword is ill entrusted to an angry man.

20 Nor should we think that anger contributes anything to greatness of mind. That is not greatness; it is swelling. In bodies bloated with a mass of diseased fluid, the disease is not growth but a deadly excess. All those whom a crazed mind lifts above human thoughts believe that they breathe something lofty and sublime; but there is nothing solid underneath, and what has grown up without foundations is ready to fall. Anger has nothing to stand on; it does not arise from anything firm and lasting, but is windy and empty, and it is as far from greatness of mind as rashness is from courage, insolence from confidence, gloom from austerity, cruelty from severity. There is a great difference, I say, between a lofty mind and a proud one. Irascibility attempts nothing grand or noble; on the contrary, it seems to me the mark of a sluggish and unhappy mind, aware of its own weakness, to smart often, like ulcerated and sick bodies that groan at the lightest touch. So anger is a vice above all of women and children. “But it befalls men too.” Yes, for men too have the characters of children and women. “Well then? Are there not some words spoken by angry men that seem to come from a great mind?” Yes, to those who do not know what true greatness is: such as that dreadful and abominable line, “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”16 You can tell it was written in Sulla’s age. I do not know which was worse to wish on himself, to be hated or to be feared. “Let them hate.” It occurs to him that they will curse him, plot against him, crush him. What did he add? May the gods damn him! What a hateful remedy he found! “Let them hate”: and then what? “So long as they obey”? No. “So long as they approve”? No. Then what? “So long as they fear.” On those terms I would not want even to be loved. Do you think this was said with a great spirit? You are wrong; that is not greatness but monstrousness. There is no reason to trust the words of angry men: their noise is loud and threatening, but within, the mind is utterly fearful. Nor need you think it true, what we read in that most eloquent man Titus Livy: “a man of great rather than good character.”17 The two cannot be separated: either it will be good as well, or it will not be great either, because I understand greatness of mind to be unshaken, solid within, even and firm from the bottom up, such as cannot exist in evil characters. They may be terrible and turbulent and destructive; but greatness, whose foundation and strength is goodness, they will not have. Yet by their talk, their efforts, and all their outward show they will win belief in their greatness; they will say something you might think came from a great mind, like Gaius Caesar.18 Angry at the sky because its thunder drowned out the pantomime dancers, whom he imitated more eagerly than he watched them, and because his revels were being frightened by thunderbolts (and very badly aimed ones at that), he challenged Jupiter to a fight, and a fight with no quarter, shouting that line of Homer:

“Lift me, or I will lift you.”19

What madness! He thought either that he could not be harmed even by Jupiter or that he could harm even Jupiter. I believe these words of his did no small part in rousing the minds of the conspirators; for it seemed the limit of endurance to put up with a man who would not put up with Jupiter.

21 There is nothing great, then, nothing noble in anger, not even when it seems violent and contemptuous of gods and men. Or if anyone thinks anger produces a great mind, let him think the same of luxury: it wants to rest on ivory, be dressed in purple, be roofed with gold, move lands, shut in seas, send rivers over cliffs, hang groves in the air. Let him think avarice too the mark of a great mind: it broods over heaps of gold and silver, farms estates the size of provinces, and has wider estates under each one of its bailiffs than consuls once drew by lot. Let him think lust the mark of a great mind: it swims across straits, castrates troops of boys, walks under a husband’s sword in contempt of death. Let him think ambition the mark of a great mind: it is not content with offices held for a year; if it could, it would fill the calendar with a single name and set up its titles all over the world. All these, no matter how far they go and spread, are narrow, wretched, and low; virtue alone is lofty and exalted, and nothing is great that is not also calm.

Notes

  1. 1. Lucius Annaeus Novatus, Seneca’s elder brother, later called Gallio after his adoptive father; as proconsul of Achaea he appears in the Acts of the Apostles (18:12–17).

  2. 2. A gap in the manuscript. The two passages that follow are quoted from this book by later writers, Martin of Braga (sixth century) and Lactantius (fourth century); the text then resumes in the middle of a sentence.

  3. 3. Posidonius of Apamea (c. 135–51 BC), Stoic philosopher who taught at Rhodes.

  4. 4. Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.545–546, from the plague on Aegina.

  5. 5. Plato, Republic 1.335d.

  6. 6. Germanic peoples who invaded Italy and were destroyed by Gaius Marius at Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and Vercellae (101 BC).

  7. 7. Quintus Fabius Maximus, called Cunctator (“the Delayer”), who wore Hannibal down by refusing battle during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC).

  8. 8. The first is Scipio Africanus, who invaded Africa in 204 BC and defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202. The second is Scipio Aemilianus, who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC and took Numantia in Spain in 133 BC after a long siege.

  9. 9. Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), Aristotle’s pupil and successor as head of his school.

  10. 10. A magistrate passing a death sentence changed his dress; the exact form of the change is uncertain. The punishments that follow are Roman: parricides were sewn into a leather sack and drowned, and traitors were thrown from the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitol.

  11. 11. Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), founder of the Stoic school.

  12. 12. Probably Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, consul in 7 BC, who killed himself in AD 20 while on trial for the death of Germanicus.

  13. 13. Hieronymus of Rhodes, a Peripatetic philosopher of the third century BC.

  14. 14. The bundle of rods, with an ax, carried by lictors before a Roman magistrate as the sign of his power to punish.

  15. 15. Plato, Laws 11.934a.

  16. 16. From the tragedy Atreus by Lucius Accius (170–c. 86 BC).

  17. 17. The passage is lost, and the man Livy described is not known.

  18. 18. The emperor known as Caligula (reigned AD 37–41), killed by conspirators.

  19. 19. Homer, Iliad 23.724, Ajax’s words to Odysseus in their wrestling match.